


fine

by QixxiQ



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:28:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24751633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QixxiQ/pseuds/QixxiQ
Summary: Villanelle is fine. She doesn't need Eve fussing or caring or bringing her soup.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 10
Kudos: 231





	fine

**Author's Note:**

> only rated teen because of one use of the f-word lol

Eve slips inside her apartment, pulling the door firmly shut behind her and quickly blocking out the brisk November wind swirling at her heels. She stomps on the little mat near the door as she shrugs out of her coat, juggling the package she has squirrled close to her chest to keep the warmth from being leached away by the dreary UK weather.

“I got you soup,” she says to a vaguely human-shaped lump on the couch, dropping the paper bag onto the coffee table. “From that little place on the corner.” Continuing, into the kitchen Eve begins to dig through the drawers for spoons. How do they not have any spoons? Ten thousand knives... “A ha!” She finally locates them in the third drawer and when she looks back, triumphantly holding the spoons aloft, the lump hasn’t moved. “Did you hear?” She circles around the back of the couch and pokes what she hopes is a shoulder.

“Fuck. Off.” Villanelle’s voice is muffled and congested like she hasn’t blown her nose and has her face crammed into the cushions.

Eve sighs. Not out loud, more like in her head, counting down from 10 as she works through various choice responses. “I got you soup,” she repeats a little more firmly.

“I didn’t ask you to.” Now her voice just sounds petulant.

Eve’s fingers curl into the back of the couch. “You’re sick,” she leans a little closer. “You have to eat soup.”

This gets Villanelle to poke her head out from under the blankets. She looks… awful and Eve pulls back just a little. She squints, hair barely contained in a lopsided bun, normally pale face nearly translucent save for the pink flush across her cheeks and red rawness under her nose, mouth parted in a desperate bid to breathe. “Says who?” she asks, a defiant glint in her eye.

The question catches Eve off guard. “E-everyone.” Villanelle twists her head. “Everyone says… it’s, it’s what you do,” Eve snorts, pulled up short by Villanelle’s bleary-eyed mocking expression.

It takes a moment, as though Villanelle is trying to read layers in between Eve’s words, but then she shrugs and rolls herself into a sitting position still bundled in all her blankets like a stuffed pancake.

Eve sits down next to her, giving a gentle little shove that gets Villanelle to scootch closer to the arm, and pulls the food from the bag, laying it out across the coffee table. She takes the container she got for herself, and the remote control, and settles against her couch arm, flipping through channels until she finds something not entirely mind numbing. The whole time she doesn’t pay Villanelle even a bit of a glance, leaving her to her own devices. Three mouthfuls into her own dinner she peeks over and then gives Villanella a look, making noise without opening her mouth and gesturing with her utensil at Villanelle’s untouched soup.

With a heavy roll of her eyes, Villanelle tips forward and snags a tiny pack of two crackers, waving them at Eve until she looks back at the tv, placated that Villanelle is willing to eat. She picks at the corner of the plastic wrapping. Impossible to get in to. She rotates the pack around to try another corner and then another, growling in frustration at being bested by crackers. 

Silently and eyes never leaving the tv, Eve plucks the pack out of her uncooperative fingers, deftly opens it, and hands the crackers back. She waits until Villanelle has nibbled her way through one cracker before she looks over, catching her eyes and giving her a smile that Villanelle returns as she bites into the second cracker. 

She eventually makes it to the soup, although she mostly just holds the warm container and sips at the broth. Eve pats her on the leg, or where she thinks a leg is, and tells her that she’ll put it in the fridge for whenever she wants more. 

“You don’t have to stay here, you know,” Villanelle’s scratchy voice floats into the kitchen. “You don’t have to…” She gestures at herself as Eve approaches the couch. “I’m fine. Really.” 

The words are assuring, but the way she says them is all wrong. Rote. Practiced. Resigned to being left alone and Eve wonders how many times Villanelle had to say them. How many times she’d been told to suck it up or deal with it herself before ‘I’m fine’ became the first thing falling from her lips.

She reaches out, meaning to lay a comforting hand against her forehead, but Villanelle rears back, eyes wide. 

“What are you doing?”

Eve blinks, hand frozen midair, hovering just in front of Villanelle’s face. “Nothing! I wasn’t,” she sputters. “I was going to check your forehead.”

Villanelle’s eyebrows crease in confusion. “What for?”

“To see if you have a temperature,” Eve shuts her eyes. Of course Villanelle has a temperature, she thinks, mentally berating herself. Just look at her. When she opens her eyes again Villanelle looks almost embarrassed, eyeing Eve’s hand warily, and then she shrugs, visibly forcing herself to relax. 

“You can,” she slumps against the couch, trying to look uninterested in anything Eve might do, all while her eyes track Eve’s extended hand. “You know, if you really want to. If it would make you feel better.” She sniffs, nose scrunching her face into a little sneer.

Eve sits. And then she scoots a little closer. And then a little more, until they’re bumped up against each other. Then she reaches back out, pausing to raise an eyebrow to Villanelle. May I?

Villanelle’s eyes jump between her hand and her face before she weaves her head and sniffs dismissively, looking off towards a wall in the back. Do whatever.

The first brush is feather light, the backs of Eve’s fingers just barely grazing warm skin and Villanelle’s eyes flutter shut, soaking in the delicate coolness. She leans into the touch when Eve moves her hand down to cup Villanelle’s cheek, thumb brushing over her flushed skin. For a long moment there’s nothing, just Eve holding Villanelle’s face in her hand, carefully and gently. Then Villanelle cracks her glazed, hazy eyes open, struggling to focus them on Eve. “So,” she wheezes, lips quirked up in a smirk. “Am I hot?”

“Whu..,” says Eve, momentarily lost. “N-no…” Villanelle raises an eyebrow, smile tugging her mouth up. “I mean, yes… yes you’re ho..” Eve clears her throat and pulls her hand back. “You’re warm.” She stands suddenly, hands rubbing quickly down her thighs, eyes looking anywhere but Villanelle. “Paracetamol,” she announces and spins away towards the bathroom with its medicine cabinet full of drugs.

Villanelle chuckles, head lolling against the back of the couch. 

When Eve comes back she’s got a glass of water and two pills that she deposits into Villanelle’s hands. There’s a kind of fragile look in her eyes like she’s holding back on saying something or doing something… trying to convince herself that she should _something _.__

__She sits back down and tugs at the blanket around Villanelle’s shoulders, pulling it higher around her neck. Then she adjusts the blanket that’s wrapped around Villanelle’s legs. There’s more patting and fussing and fixing. Eve gets up and brings back another box of tissues when Villanelle uses multiple sheets to blow her nose. She refills the water glass before it gets below half. Her hand stretches out, hovering over the blankets and then across the back of the couch, resting for a moment before she pulls back. She moves to tuck a strand of errant hair back behind one of Villanelle’s ears, fingers drifting down her neck to smooth out the blanket across her shoulder._ _

__It’s too much. It’s so much that it hurts somewhere deep inside Villanelle’s chest._ _

__“Stop smothering me!” Villanelle turns, teeth bared. “Don’t you have other things to do?” She almost takes it back when the hurt flashes across Eve’s face. Almost. But then Eve stands and resists the urge to touch Villanelle again._ _

__“Right. Sorry, right.” She dithers in place. “If you need anything,” she begins, bright and overly cheerful and Villanelle can’t stand it._ _

__“Just go!” She slumps down into the corner of the couch and tries not to cough. “It’s fine,” she mutters and shrugs the blankets up closer to her ears, refusing to look in Eve’s direction._ _

__“I’ll just…” Eve gestures towards her bedroom. “I’ll go then.”_ _

__Villanelle wants to tell her to wait. Come back. Stay. Wants to apologize and beg and whine. To let Eve fuss and fret and fumble through caring for someone who’s never been cared for. But instead, she lets Eve leave. Listens to her quiet footsteps fade away. Listens as the apartment grows quiet and still._ _

__And then Villanelle curls up in her blankets and presses her face into the cushions and tries not to scream._ _

__When she next wakes up the apartment is very dark and very quiet and Villanelle feels very not good. Her head aches and her throat hurts and her nose is stuffy. She’s cold and hot, chills shaking her frame even though the back of her neck feels slick with sweat. She sits up and coughs, just to clear the congestion, but she ends up wheezing and doubled over with a hand pressed against her chest trying to catch her breath. Villanelle steadies her breathing and hauls herself up, swaying and having to hold onto the couch as she shuffles away. She stumbles in the dark and drags along the wall, trailing her mountain of blankets like a grand royal cape._ _

__The lights are off in Eve’s room, but the door is cracked open and there’s a pale slice of moonlight coming through the window, just enough so that Villanelle can see where Eve is. She’s stretched out on one side of the bed, leaving plenty of room for another body. She stumbles into the room, pausing only briefly on the side of the bed, a cursory consideration of whether she’d be welcome or not, and then flops forward, landing across the other woman._ _

__Eve bolts upright with a string of half-formed curses tumbling out of her. She fumbles for her nightstand, for the knife she keeps there that she doesn’t know Villanelle knows she keeps there, before realizing what, or who, is actually lying across her in a tangled heap, arms wrapping around her middle in a sloppy sort of hug. “Villanelle, christ,” she gasps. “What is it? What’s wrong? Are you…?” She trails off, hand coming to rest on the top of Villanelle’s head, fingers beginning a steady rhythm through her hair as her breathing slows._ _

__It takes a lot. Hell, it takes almost everything Villanelle has to dredge the words from her very core. “Don’t feel good,” she whispers and waits, tense and ready. Waits for Eve to send her back to the couch, or to say that she shouldn’t complain, it’s not that bad, it could always be worse. But other than a momentary stutter in the movement of Eve’s hand, that Villanelle wouldn’t have even noticed if she hadn’t been watching for it, there’s nothing. No rebuke, no disapproval. Eve only makes a soft, sympathetic noise and her hand trails down to rub a few circles over Villanelle’s back before floating back up to comb through her hair. “I’m sorry,” she says, voice as soft as her fingers gliding from Villanelle’s head down her back and then up again. And damn if she doesn’t sound really and truly sorry. Sorry that Villanelle is hurting, sorry that she can’t make it go away._ _

__Eve keeps up the steady motion and Villanelle relaxes, tension draining from her with each pass of Eve’s hand. “Tomorrow,” she mumbles, face pressing tighter against Eve’s middle. Eve makes an inquiring noise. “Tomorrow I want more soup.”_ _

__Villanelle can’t see Eve’s face, but as she drifts off she hears a quiet exhale and knows Eve’s smiling._ _


End file.
